While your children weep unstopping
Can you hear us? Do you care?
Most of them were more bravely Methodist in flavor.
God will keep you little angel
Till we greet you by and by,
For a moment is our sorrow
Joy forever in the sky.
My favorite was for a young man who had died more than a hundred years before, but to whom I had attached more than one of my romantic fantasies.
Oh, how bravely did you leave us
Sailing for a foreign shore
How our hearts did break within us
At the thought of Nevermore.
He had been only nineteen. I fancied that I would have married him, had he lived.
I needed to concentrate on the groceries. Momma still had the large shopping bag. Caroline could hardly bear to go as slowly as the two of us had to, so she tended to skip on ahead and then come back to share some of the details of her trip to the mainland. It was one of these times when she was walking toward us that she suddenly lowered her voice.
“There he is. There’s that man from the ferry.”
I looked back over my shoulder, being careful to keep my free hand on the grocery boxes.
“Don’t be rude,” Momma said.
Caroline leaned toward me. “Edgar is pulling all his stuff in a cart.”
“Hush,” Momma warned. “Turn around.”
Caroline was slow to obey. “Who is he, Momma?”
“Shh. I don’t know.”
Despite his age the man was walking remarkably fast. We couldn’t hurry because of the wagon, so he soon overtook us and walked purposefully down the street ahead as though he knew exactly where he was going. There was no longer any sense of a lost child in his manner. The Roberts’ house was the last one on the street, but he walked right past it, to where the oyster-shell street gave way to the dirt path across the southern marsh.
“Where’s he think he’s going?” Caroline asked.
The only thing farther along the path besides the marsh itself was one long-abandoned house.
“I wonder—” Momma began, but we were turning in at our own gate, and she didn’t finish the sentence.
5
The stranger from the ferry offered no explanation for his presence on the island. Gradually, the people of Rass built one from ancient memory lavishly cemented with rumor. The man had gone to the Wallace place, which had been deserted for twenty years since the death of old Captain
Wallace six months after his wife. He had found it without asking anyone the way and had moved in and begun to put it into repair as though he belonged there.
“He’s Hiram Wallace,” Grandma had announced—everyone over fifty had come to the same conclusion. “The old ones thought he was dead. But here he is. Too late to bring them neither comfort.”
Bit by bit, straining my short patience to its utmost limit, the story of Hiram Wallace emerged. Call’s grandmother told him that when she was a child, there had been a young waterman by that name, the only child of Captain Charles Wesley Wallace. It was back in the days when nearly every boat on the Bay was under sail, before hard blue crabs brought in much money. Captain Wallace and his son tonged for oysters in the winter, and in the summer they netted fish, chiefly menhaden and rockfish. That they had made a tidy profit was evidenced by the size of their house, which stood apart from the rest of the village. As my grandmother remembered it, their land had been large enough in those days for real grass to grow in a pasture, enough to support one of the few cows in the island’s history.